Kildall

I subscribe to a delightful periodical called "The American Heritage of Invention & Technology." The current issue has an article entitled, "They Made America," an interview with Harold Evans, the author of the book by the same name. It has this to say about Gary Kildall, I&T: Do you have a favorite person? Or favorite story? Evans: "Well, I think Gary Kildall is the most abused of all the innovators. In justice to him, to his memory, his is the most monstrous story in the book. We all of us today benefit from Gary Kildall's innovations, and they were basically snitched from him. He was betrayed by IBM. He should be celebrated instead of forgotten, and he is the one I feel the strongest about. "He suffered from pure idealism. He believed that his operating system -- which was the basis of Bill Gates's fortune and the IBM PC -- should not be exploited to achieve a monopoly of applications. By himself he laid the foundations for the software industry. He would not have gone into word processing and spreadsheets and the like because he believed that would have yielded an overweening monopoly. And he's been proved absolutely right."